


leaves that aren't burned away

by EasyPeasyPanic



Series: all of my founders era fics [13]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Child Death, Everyone Needs A Hug, Multi, Threats of Rape/Non-Con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-01
Updated: 2020-01-01
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:22:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22071739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EasyPeasyPanic/pseuds/EasyPeasyPanic
Summary: Tajima thinks of three dead sisters and three dead sons, and swears to whoever was listening that it wouldn't happen again.___Or the brief Uchiha Tajima backstory we didn't know we needed.
Series: all of my founders era fics [13]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1718458
Comments: 3
Kudos: 72





	leaves that aren't burned away

**_____ **

He has three older sisters. No, that isn't right. 

Tajima  _ had  _ three older sisters. It was different, trying to remember that there were once three because he can only remember fighting by the side of two of them, and very faintly remembers the face of the one that died in her late childhood. 

Her memory was faded, wilting away like the flowers placed across her simple gravesite (a pile of round stones that his other sister brought back from up river). Her name was Chiyome. She was nearly thirteen, and Tajima remembers her in simple ways. All knobby knees, awkward hugs that are too bony and too tight for such long arms, pale skin and  _ gaudy  _ freckles all over her cheeks and down her arms, and teeth that looked almost too big in her mouth when she smiled, all white and no gums. As if her face still hadn't realized she had been nearing adulthood, and simply forgot to let her grow into her teethy smile. 

Chiyome doesn't have a smell, not that he recalls. Maybe she wore perfume, or perhaps she didn't as the Inuzuka were their enemies in those years and such strong scents were dangerous. Her eyes were black, but he can't remember how she wore her hair or if she favored the strange lip coloring that his other sisters made from the safflower that grows in the Northern Compound. He was nearly four when she died, just old enough to remember the ugly freckles that still made people giggle to remember, but not quite old enough to miss her as dearly as his sisters did.

She died. 

He doesn't even remember how she dies. Was it an ambush? Was she struck down immediately, her eyes squinting at the orange wash of the sun as it shined in her eyes, so bright and so close to the Heavens that she didn't see the glint of the blade as it came towards her throat? Or perhaps it was the hidden tags in the ground, just deep enough for a sensor to disregard the threat of explosion, but just strong enough for instant (horrific) death when she stepped on it. It could have been poison, infection, starvation, or disease. 

Was it selfish of him not to miss someone he couldn't even remember the birthday or death day of? Tajima wonders if he ever really had three sisters, or if the Chiyome in his memories was a mixture of stories told and his own curious dreams of a stranger with familiar blood. 

He thinks of it often. Two, not three. Three, but now only two. 

Two older sisters. 

(And one with gaudy freckles and no pulse.)

**_____ **

Takeko left on a mission, a simple assignment from the Daimyō of the Land of Rice Paddies for a shinobi escort from the palace of the Daimyō of the Land of Fire to the border of his homeland. It should have been a day's worth of travel to arrive, and a day's worth of travel back, given the roads were clear and the weather was kind. 

Spring brings rain, and rain brings mud. Mud seems to slow everyone and everything down. There was something too powerful to name for the emotion felt when thick mud squishes between their toes in their sandals that seems to slow everyone down. Tajima accounted for that. He expected Takeko back in three days' time, give or take almost twenty-four hours. 

Three days turned to a week. A week to a month. Months to years. She never came back. 

Nobody's too sure what happens exactly, other than she was seperated from her traveling companions on the way back from a successful escort. One moment she was in front of them, steady and  _ quick _ , and the next she was gone. A few of her men (the two sensors in the party) say they felt a flicker of foreign chakra a moment before she dove to the ground from the trees to the path back home. She hit the ground first, and they never see her again. They had sent out search parties, wrote to their allies, even scoured for news with their spies (who's prices aren't cheap). She'd disappeared. 

He heard the rumors, about the things that happen with women when they're taken. Some are taken as wives, concubines, things that are closer to property than women of noble clans. Others are closer to brood mares, for there are many ways to steal a clan's kekkei genkai, but the easiest is to steal a woman to mother them the desired jutsu, more so when it's Dōjutsu. His sister's chained somewhere, his mind whispers, forced to bear child after child until her body gives out on her. Or perhaps she's killed after just one. 

His cousin, Usuke, makes a joke about it one night when he's had plenty to drink and not enough sense to shut up.  _ Maybe she's off with a rich new husband, and we're searchin' for no goddamn reason! Let her have her rich babies and let us have a night off!  _ Tajima assigns him night watch for two weeks straight, and during their weekly sparring match, he sees  _ red _ . He beats on Usuke until his fists are throbbing, the skin busted and bleeding from hitting his teeth at an angle, and his cousin's almost unrecognizable. 

The rumors quiet down some. Maybe she wasn't captive. Maybe she wasn't taken as a quick prize, but discarded and killed after the man took her virtue.  _ Rape. After he raped her.  _ Or worse, they whisper, after they took her eyes. Her Sharingan. The thought sends fresh rage through his veins. It wasn't right. It wasn't--

Bile burns his throat the thought. He imagined pretty Takeko, with her unevenly cropped hair and colored lips, and a tantō at her waist, being thrown into the dirt like a discarded doll. Her blood soaking the dirt, staining the flowers and the grass, death  _ overtaking  _ life. He imagined her screaming, but struggled to remember her laughter. She had always snorted when she laughed, once or twice. 

He misses her snorting laughter now. 

Tajima imagined the sticky, dark flesh of tissue left over and  _ rotting  _ where her stolen eyes once were. He choked down his fury, his disgust, his  _ terror _ . 

Father pressed a hand against his shoulder, firm and unyielding. His lips are pressed tightly together, thin. He doesn't particularly get emotional over such things, but his eyes are blank and hard, just enough for Tajima to know that his father is cracking beneath his mask of absolute  _ nothingness _ . 

"She was just a daughter." He told Tajima. "We can't keep wasting resources on a girl." 

"Of course, Otou-sama." 

Father's wrinkles are deeper now, more pronounced against his skin and by his eyes. He isn't even that old. "Find your sister. She's very emotional. Let her hold you. You're young enough to comfort her without much question."

Tajima leaves without a word. 

**_____ **

He's nearly sixteen when he loses his last sister. 

It's different with her. He doesn't lose her on a battlefield, no matter how he feels a shinobi should die, and it infuriates him beyond belief to think his fiercest sister was brought down by something so...so…

_Unfair_. 

She was the middle sister, though it didn't matter much anymore since both her older and younger sister were long dead. A woman of twenty five, she had been pulled from active duty two years before, right after the disapperance of Takeko. Despite her outbursts, her fury and her pleas, their father would  _ not  _ be swayed from his decision. His word was  _ law _ . She had been removed from their ranks as a kunoichi. In private, when she would hold Tajima in her lap as a mother would a small child (or at least he hoped it was how, for his mother had died when he was just a toddler), she would rant and rave about her misfortune. 

" _ How is fair? That I've served and bled and killed for a clan that feels I'm better suited to chopping vegetables and washing briefs. All because I wasn't fortunate enough to have a cock between my legs."  _

_ "Nee-sama, you've never washed briefs in your entire life. We have lower ranked cousins for that."  _

_ "That's NOT the point, Taji-kun." _

In private, however, when he would be with Father, it was an entirely different situation, though he could never have crossed the line and explained their differing views. Father looks tired leaning over fifteen scrolls in the light of flickering hands. Worn.  _ Tired _ . Broken, even. 

Father's voice is gratingly heartbroken, "I have one son and one daughter. I can't excuse a boy from the battlefield, not my heir. But a girl? By the Sage, I can protect at least one of my children."

But not from everything. In the end, all Father did was give his only daughter plenty of time to wed a man beneath her, a lower cousin born between a civilian and an Uchiha woman. There wasn't much to do when she swelled with child other than to let them marry, and his wild girl settles down. Tajima wants to remember her as he saw her growing up. Fierce and strong, toned and muscled, with a round face and the Mangekyō Sharingan whirling around in her eyes for she had earned and achieved greatness and prowess on the battlefield.

In the end, he remembers her death more often. She had wanted to die beside her cousins, her clansmen, defending and protecting their lands and family name, dying as a shinobi should by the blade. It does not happen that way. 

She died bleeding. 

Bleeding so heavily, so profusely that her entire futon was soaked in it, that her entire was soaked in it. The midwives had screamed for help, begging for medics from the field with more medical prowess than themselves, but even their most skilled can't stop the bleeding.  _ Something inside went wrong _ , Midwife Hanako explained after her body went cold. It happens often with women when they give birth. It can't be helped. The child survives, however. A boy. 

Father named him Hikaku. 

Tajima doesn't think it's a fair trade, a girl for a boy, a sister for a nephew, but the Gods take and take. They feel no remorse for another sister taken. 

**_____ **

His wife is sweet and kind and amusing. 

She has a silver tongue and a playful smile.

But Tajima doesn't favor her, not really. He's never really preferred the touch of women, save that of his sisters. But his clan doesn't care for the fact that a woman's soft curves aren't his ideal match, or that he prefers the strength of a man's arms around his waist. They see the way he looks at the men, and they marry him anyway. He does his duty, however, and the fair Kanna Uchiha is soon with child. 

He had always thought to tell his father first, but it doesn't happen like that. Father was killed three days before the healers confirmed her pregnancy. Tajima is ushered in as Clan Leader quickly and without much fuss. It isn't the new responsibility that drives him to a fresh madness and fear, but rather the idea of having a child. 

He's seen war. He's lived through war, and is still fighting desperately to live and pull his family through it too. He's heard the screams of men unfairly left alive, the ungodly wailing of those unfortunate enough to have lost a limb to a katana or to have stepped on an explosive tag and  _ lived _ . The smell of charred flesh and the gurgle of a drowning man haunt his thoughts. The buzz of lightning jerking a fresh corpse, the strength of electric chakra undeterred by death. The sound of bones  _ snapping  _ like trees splintering pepper through his dreams. He can hear blades clash together like thunder in his ears, his own heart pounding somehow quieter than the begging of little children for their lives. The smell of iron and old leather mingle in his nose, the taste of blood (his own and others) turns his stomach at the thought of any food, and he can't--

He can't--

Tajima dreams of Saeko's Mangekyō Sharingan, of Takeko's snorting laughter, and Chiyome's unsightly freckles. He dreams of dead sisters. Of sisters taken. Of children stolen away, cousins or dead enemies that were barely old enough to  _ hold _ a blade. And he doesn't want a child.

He needs an heir, he knows, but he doesn't want one. 

(And secretly he prays that his wife miscarries. She doesn't. Kanna is a strong woman. She bears strong children.)

He thinks of Chiyome's freckles, and Saeko's Sharingan, and Takeko's laughter. He thinks of them as his wife labors.  _ Not a girl,  _ Tajima prays to Gods that have long since forsaken the world they created.  _ Please, not a daughter.  _

Madara is born on the warmest day of winter. And it shatters Tajima, breaks him apart. Deliberately destroys him because he looks at this helpless little  _ thing _ , barely a person and bald as an egg, ugly and red, and he thinks  _ I would die for you, my precious boy. My son. My child.  _

And then the twins come, Reisen and Kurohi, two more little boys that he has to shove kunai into the hands of, just like Madara. 

He has to push them harder, train them  _ better _ . He wants them to live. He wants them to survive. Madara's nearly three when Akaishi is born, and four when Izuna follows. He grows up a prodigy and he's so fiercely proud of Madara that it aches. He's proud of his responsibility to his brothers, to his clan, to his family. He's proud of his talents and his fiery soul, of his calm smile and his knowing eyes. 

And he's proud of how desperately Madara wants to live. He clings to life like a drowning man to a rope, honing his every skill to promise himself and his brothers their lives. 

And then Kanna dies. 

And Tajima doesn't know what to do with that fresh grief for a woman he didn't love, not the way she wanted, but more like he felt towards his sisters. It wasn't as intimate, but more intently important. She dies quickly and without much time to intervene, by their second son's side during battle for mere moments, and then Tajima blinked and she was--

Gone. Dead. A stray kunai through her throat, a hand gripped in her long pretty hair to keep her close and still.

(He made Madara cut his long hair that night. Slashes off his own too with his tantō, crops it short and uneven like Takeko. He'll fix it later. His nephew Hikaku refuses to cut his shorter than shoulder length, so he makes him pull it up.)

Tajima resigns himself to loss and pain, so thankful for his boys. His sons with their smiling faces, round and chubby, and their nature gifts, and their gender. He doesn't have to worry about childbirth or stolen virtue. Rape is still prevelant, but not as much for boys, not so much with a clan leader's boys. He'll be careful with his boys. 

He'll protect his sons. 

He looks at Madara with his wild smile and messy hair, at the determination in Reisen's eyes, the kindness in Kurohi's touch (a potential healer, certainly), at Akaishi's loud, high-pitched laughter, and Izuna's playful nature. 

And he thinks,  _ I'm going to be different than my father. I can protect my children. I can do better. I can be better. They're going to live-- _

**_____ **

Akaishi dies first. His cousin, Usuke, and a lower clansman bring him back the body. Their lips are pressed together tightly. A surprise Senju attack, his cousin had explained, as Tajima stumbles his way past his four other boys. Shoves them aside and enters into the room. He will never forget the scream he hears. It was loud and horrified, animalistic and  _ raw _ grief. It echoes in his mind  _ still.  _

(Was it my own?)

He'll never forget his son's body either. The white sheet covering him slowly fading into a blackened  _ red _ from the blood covering his body. Those warm black eyes closed, his tan skin turned into a sour milky white  _ so close  _ to being the same shade as his mother, but so heartbreaking to see happen. His belly had been split clean through, spilling out precious blood and internal organs, but one of the healers had been gracious enough to use bandages and armor to put him back together again. There was so much  _ blood.  _

He remembers forcing Usuke to leave the room, his mission report and condolences lost on Tajima's grieving mind, to give him fading time with his boy. He lays his head upon the boy's chest after pressing a long kiss against his forehead. 

Akaishi, his fourth son, his precious boy, his joy and pride, his  _ child _ . Not even close to being a man, only just a little boy. He laid there, with his boy, unsure of what to feel in the numbness. For a few minutes, Tajima doesn't cry or sob, just holds his child.

This pain felt  _ different.  _ Worse. How can that be? How can loss be  _ worse _ when he's so experienced in it? He's lost his mother and father, he's lost his three sisters, he's lost those freckles and laughter and sharingan, and--

He isn't whole anymore. He's shattered beyond repair. 

"I'm sorry, my boy." He whispers to the little boy, feeling a sob catch in his throat that he forces down. "I'm sorry, son, I didn't protect you." 

He cries softly into his boy's loose, leather armor. 

He buries his son the next day. Madara is quiet, like a wraith, a picture of solemn blackness. His eldest son holds Izuna in his arms, the twins flanking his side, and he whispers softly to them. Whatever he says makes them smile, Izuna especially. Madara was always his good man in the storm, always his smart, strong, kind boy.

But even Madara can't repair the hearts of the two remaining brothers when Reisen dies only months later after a mission to deliver grain safely to a village nearby for a good payment and a quarter of the crop in return. It's a good mission. He sends the twins. His older brother brings back his little twin's body in sewn up pieces, his beautiful black eyes missing, his clan emblem ripped from his clothing. They had stolen his eyes. 

His plain, black eyes. He hadn't activated his Sharingan yet. There was no point in taking them. Perhaps they, whoever stole them, think they have won a great prize, but they have nothing. They mutilated his son for  _ nothing _ . 

This time, he doesn't cry until the first shove of dirt hits his son's coffin. Nobody sees it. He's a master of Genjutsu, after all. 

And when Kurohi is killed, well Tajima doesn't have anymore tears left to weep. He says nothing when he plucks the sword out of his son's chest like an apple from a branch. Quickly buries him and pretends he didn't remember the  _ crack _ of the metal into tender bone, pretends he didn't hear the wails of pain, pretends it was a quicker death than it really had been. 

He pretends those  _ Senju Bastards _ had been decent enough shinobi to get the boy in the heart rather than let him suffer around a sword's blow to his right side. He pretends he didn't have time to save him, and still failed. 

Tajima thinks of three dead sisters and three dead sons, and swears to whoever was listening that it wouldn't happen again. 

**_____ **

When Madara starts to smile again, Tajima thinks,  _ something's happened. _ He's distant to his father, which isn't a surprise anymore, but even more so than usual. 

He hopes it's a girl, or he supposed a boy would be fine too, that caught his attention so he searches through Madara's interactions with the clan. 

It's mainly Izuna by his side, his little shadow and his favorite companion, but Madara does spend a great deal of time with Setsuna and Yui, so it leaves him wondering. Tajima doesn't mind his new found happiness, but he worries about Madara's new absence. He disappears to the riverbank, disappears into his own mind during training sessions and mission briefings, and it makes his bones ache with worry. A crush was one thing, but it couldn't compromise his son. It couldn't--

"Izuna." Tajima whispers into his youngest's ear, after they watched Madara volunteer for laundry duty so he could go to the river.

Big black eyes blink up at him, "Yes, Otou-sama?" 

"Do me a favor, son. Go see if Aniki needs help in his duties. He always goes alone to the river. It must be lonely. Why don't your surprise him?"

Izuna's mouth drops at the realization, and then he  _ beams.  _ He twists out of his leather, throwing it aside.

"Hai! I'll surprise Aniki!" He declares. "I'll conceal my chakra-- it'll test his sensory skills, too." And then he's off, stumbling his way into his sandals as he runs. 

When he comes back, his eyes are hard and his news is worse. Tajima doesn't need to know anything past a general description to know  _ exactly  _ who that boy is that his son's been meeting. 

(The boy his son  _ kissed _ .)

He'd know the fruit of Butsuma Senju anywhere. 

And so he plans and he schemes, because Tajima will end this quick and sever the bonds between them quicker. It's a chance, an oppurunity to hit the Senju where it hurts, to give victory to his clan. 

And a chance to protect his son. He wants Madara to be happy, to have a friend, to find true and happy love, to find some sort of relief in a world that offered nothing but agony, but not with the enemy. Not with that  _ boy. _

Tajima thinks of his eldest sister, Takeko. One moment she was in front of them, steady and  _ quick _ , and the next she was gone. They'd never seen her again. 

He can't imagine Madara being taken, by force or by his heart's desire to follow that Senju boy, because that thought would destroy him completely. Fuck the Senju, fuck their loss and their pains and their dead children. He has to think of what's best for his clan, for his son, and to avenge the boys he lost. He thinks of three dead sons and three dead sisters, of Senju blades piercing through the Uchiha, of freckles and Sharingan and laughter, of black eyes stolen and a missing body, and Tajima throws his armor on. 

Puts his tantō in its proper place. 

(If he has to kill that Senju boy, Hashirama, so be it. It'll be a fitting loss. Butsuma's heir in exchange for Tajima's three boys. A son for sons. If he has to rip apart Madara's heart to get his son's mind focused again and get him to adulthood, so be it. He has a clan to think of. He can't let the Senju win. Can't let them live.)

"Come, Izuna." Tajima demands. His youngest places the metal vest across his chest, and Tajima tightens the straps. "Your brother should be meeting that boy soon. We need to take care of it." 

Izuna nods, determined. Reminds him of a boy being sent to his sister's room, still young enough to be of comfort. 

And Tajima feels nothing but regret. 

_**____** _  
  



End file.
